1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image forming apparatus capable of setting a password for each image data to ensure its security and to an image output apparatus capable of setting a password for each image data to ensure its security.
2. Description of Related Art
Some prior art complex machines, or multifunctional peripherals have a function to produce image data upon scanning original documents or pictures to store the data in a USB (Universal Serial Bus) memory device (hereinafter, called to as “ScanToMemory function”), and a function to print images upon reading out image data from a USB memory without accessing any host computer (hereinafter called to as “DirectPrint function”). Such a multifunctional peripheral may have a function to set a password for each image data and not to output the image data as protection unless the correct password is entered for maintaining the secrecy of the produced image data.
In Japanese Patent Application Publication (KOKAI) No. 2006-341591, for example, a printing apparatus is disclosed in having an identification information setting unit for setting identification information for each printing job and in doing printing processing of the printing job including the identification information coinciding to the identification information based on the printing request in a case where the identification information based on the printing request and the identification information of the printing job stored in a printing job storing unit are compared and found as matched to each other.
With image forming apparatuses in prior art, however, if once a password is set to image data, the password must be entered at each time when the image is outputted, so that there raises a problem that users feel such entries as laborious and far from their satisfaction.